I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

by Michelle McNamara

was injured. Yellow crime-scene tape had gone up three times in the neighborhood, unusual for an area so small—less than two square miles—and so homey that deputies affectionately nicknamed the teenagers they regularly ran out of the avocado groves for smoking weed the red-eye gang.

  This was Santa Barbara County, home to President Reagan’s 688-acre vacation ranch and also a popular retreat for moneyed dilettantes with a hippie bent, where you could wear flip-flops all day or playact in a staged rodeo, where you could enjoy historically preserved Spanish architecture unsullied by garish billboards (a ban won after a multiyear campaign waged by aesthetically inclined civic leaders). From 1950 until 1991, the only stops on Highway 101 between an otherwise open 435 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco were four traffic lights in Santa Barbara; depending on whom you believe, this was because locals feared that a freeway would block their ocean view, or because they wanted tourists to patronize local businesses, or because they felt people should be encouraged to pause and contemplate life, and what better place to do this than in Santa Barbara, America’s Riviera, ensconced between a rugged mountain range and the Pacific Ocean? Who didn’t want to idle at a stoplight in paradise? The answer, eventually, was no one. The accidents were legion, weekend traffic was a gridlock, and pollution from idling cars became immense.

  INVESTIGATORS FELT THEY KNEW THE NIGHT HE LEARNED HE HAD to be careful. They knew the night that changed him. The first crime they could connect him to, where their rewinding stopped: October 1, 1979. Less than a week after Kimo was stabbed. That was the night a Goleta couple on Queen Ann Lane awakened to a blinding flashlight and a young man’s clenched-teeth whisper. The woman was ordered to tie up her boyfriend. Then the intruder tied her. He rummaged around, opening and slamming

  drawers. Cursing. Threatening. Asking for money but not focused on it. He led the woman into the living room and made her lie face down on the floor, throwing a pair of tennis shorts over her head as a blindfold. She heard him enter their kitchen. She heard him chanting to himself.

  “I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em.”

  A surge of adrenaline allowed the woman to escape her bindings and flee out the front door screaming. Her boyfriend, bound in the bedroom, was able to hop into the backyard. When he heard the intruder coming, he dropped and rolled behind an orange tree, narrowly eluding the searching beam of the flashlight.

  The couple’s next-door neighbor was an FBI agent. Alerted by the woman’s scream, he came outside just in time to see a man furiously pedal past on a stolen silver Nishiki ten-speed. Pendleton shirt. Jeans. Knife holster. Tennis shoes. A blur of brown hair. The agent gave chase in his car; his headlights connected with the biker a few blocks later on San Patricio Drive. When the headlights hit him, the suspect dropped the bike and hopped the fence between two houses.

  The couple could give only a general description. White male. Dark hair above the collar. Five ten or five eleven. Around twenty-five, they guessed.

  After that, none of his victims ever lived to describe him again.

  * * *

  THE BODIES WERE IN THE BEDROOM.

  On the morning of December 30, 1979, Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a call at 767 Avenida Pequena, the condominium of osteopathic surgeon Dr. Robert Offerman. Offerman’s good friends Peter and Marlene Brady* had arrived

  for a scheduled tennis game with him and his new girlfriend, Alexandria Manning, and found a sliding glass door open at the condo. They stepped inside and called out to Offerman but got no response. Peter crossed the living room and peered down the hallway toward the bedroom.

  There’s a “girl lying on the bed naked,” he reported back to his wife.

  “Let’s go,” Marlene said, not wanting to interrupt. They began to leave.

  But after a few paces, Peter stopped. Something wasn’t right. Hadn’t he called out to Offerman loudly? He pivoted and returned to the bedroom to take a closer look.

  When the deputies arrived, Marlene Brady was standing out front crying.

  “There are two people dead inside,” she said.

  Debra Alexandria Manning lay on the right side of the waterbed, her head turned to the left, her wrists bound behind her with white nylon twine. Offerman was on his knees at the foot of the bed; he clutched a length of the same twine in his hand. Pry marks indicated that the offender used a screwdriver to force his way inside the home, probably in the middle of the night when the couple was asleep. Flashing a gun, he may have suggested he was there to rob them: two rings belonging to Manning were found hidden between the mattress and bed frame.

  The attacker most likely tossed the twine at Manning and demanded she tie up Offerman, which she did, but not tightly. Investigators believe at some point, perhaps after the offender was finished tying Manning’s wrists, Offerman broke free from his bindings in an attempt to fight back.

  Neighbors reported that at around three a.m. they heard a burst of gunfire, which was followed by a pause and then another shot. Offerman was shot three times in the back and chest. Manning’s single wound was to the upper left back of her head.

  The book on Offerman’s nightstand was Your Perfect Right: A Guide to Assertive Behavior, by Robert E. Alberti. It was the holidays. A green wreath with red flowers hung on the front door. There was a pine tree in a bucket in the entryway. As authorities processed the crime scene, they stepped around a turkey carcass wrapped in cellophane that had been discarded on the patio. They concluded that at some point the killer had opened the refrigerator and helped himself to Dr. Offerman’s leftover Christmas dinner.

  Whoever the killer was, he’d been on a restless hunt that night. Investigators could track the star-shaped pattern from his Adidas running shoes as he circled Offerman’s condo. They noted the trampled flowerbed at 769 Avenida Pequena, the vacant condo next door. Inside was evidence of squatting, most notably in the bathroom, where a length of nylon twine was left behind.

  Reports came in of ransackings and break-ins in the neighborhood in the hours before the murders. When a couple who lived on Windsor Court, a half mile from Offerman’s condo, pulled up to their house at around ten fifteen p.m., they spotted a man running through their living room toward the back door. As they came inside they heard him jump the rear fence. A white male in a dark fisherman’s hat and dark jacket was all they could say for sure. He’d brutally punched their poodle in the eye.

  In the days after the murders, investigators continued to discover pieces of nylon twine dropped in various locations: on a dirt trail alongside San Jose Creek, on a lawn on Queen Ann Lane. They couldn’t be certain when the Queen Ann Lane twine had been left, though; a few doors down lived the couple who had narrowly escaped Offerman and Manning’s fate just two months before. It was all there in the police reports. Nylon twine. Pry marks. Adidas running-shoe impressions.

  Goleta, 1981

  WHAT DEBBI DOMINGO REMEMBERS MOST ABOUT THE LAST TIME she talked with her mother, Cheri, is that they didn’t talk. They screamed. It was Sunday, July 26, 1981, high summer in Santa Barbara. The coastal fog, with its smell of damp eucalyptus, was gone. The Pacific Ocean was warming up, an inviting churn of whitecaps making its way toward soft sand and an endless line of hundred-foot palm trees. Golden teenage boys with lank hair and effortless muscles headed for the water with their boards in a gait the locals called the surfer bounce. This was Santa Barbara’s magic time, and when she wasn’t at her part-time job at the Granada Theater, Debbi wanted to bask in it. She loved the energy of East Beach, especially its volleyball scene. There was one hitch, which is why Debbi hit the brakes on her ten-speed in front of a pay phone on State Street that afternoon. She dug coins from the pocket of her denim cutoffs. Her mother picked up. Debbi got right to the point.

  “I need to come get my swimsuit,” she said.

  Her mother’s stony reply surprised her.

  “No,” Cheri said.

  A spike of rage torched Debbi behind the eyes. She gripped the phone and
dug in. Mother and daughter were back where they’d left off.

  That was four days earlier and around the corner at 1311 Anacapa Street, in an unassuming little house that was the headquarters of Klein Bottle Crisis Shelter, an organization for troubled

  teens. Debbi had shown up there in the middle of July, a runaway on a bike with one hastily packed bag and a well-honed detection system for rules and how to flout them. But Klein Bottle was hardly a stern lockdown facility. The abundance of ferns hanging in macramé planters told you that. This was the peak era of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, a self-help bestseller that aimed to expose the subtle bad parenting that lurks in even the most functional-seeming families. Miller urged her readers to “find their own truth” about possible childhood abuse; in doing so, she helped ignite the talk therapy craze. Klein Bottle counselors drank tea from earthenware mugs and assured inarticulate adolescents that no feeling was too banal or shameful to share.

  In addition to assigned chores, there was one house rule: the kids could come and go as they pleased, but they had to sign an agreement to participate in therapy sessions. The staff arranged for Cheri and Debbi to meet together with a counselor to help resolve their problems.

  The Domingos must have seemed like an optimal case for mediation. Neither was a dull-eyed drug abuser exhibiting the ravages of stress and neglect. Far from it. Mother and daughter were both delicate-featured beauties. They sported matching beach-casual styles: easy on the makeup, huarache sandals, print tops, and jeans. Debbi adorned her hair with the occasional braid or side barrette. Cheri was thirty-five, a pin-thin Natalie Wood lookalike with a no-nonsense, pleasant demeanor, the result of working as an office manager. Debbi was more voluptuously built; her wide, blue eyes were attuned, as most teenagers are, to the short stretch rather than the long term. Both radiated good health and a core of self-assured calm.

  The meeting time arrived. Cursory pleasantries were exchanged as everyone took a seat. As soon as Debbi and Cheri touched down on the couch, alighting like two birds on a wire,

  they erupted. Their battles were by then front-loaded with fury, a miserable lockstep in which the only changes in position were who was incredulous and who was aggrieved. They needed no coaxing. Boundaries. Rules. Boyfriends. Disrespect. Debbi can’t remember if the counselor was a man or a woman. She only remembers shouting and a vague third presence in the room; someone who’d presumably seen it all but who exuded dumbstruck ineffectualness. In the end, Debbi fled abruptly, as she had before, a dark-haired storm of a girl pedaling away with her belongings crammed into a bag. In two weeks she’d turn sixteen.

  Cheri watched the city swallow her daughter and worried. Santa Barbara beguiled. It deceived. The promise of romance reigned, and the potential for danger was obscured. After a nineteen-second earthquake shattered much of downtown Santa Barbara in 1925, the city was rebuilt in a unified Spanish Colonial style—white plaster walls, low-pitched red tile roofs, wrought iron. Preservation-minded civic leaders continued to keep buildings low and billboards out. There was a gentle small-town feel to the place. Every day for thirty-two years, a Greek immigrant, “the popcorn man,” sold pinwheels and popcorn from his station wagon at the foot of Stearns Wharf. The smell of night-blossoming jasmine drifted in through open windows on hot evenings. The roar of the ocean rocked people to sleep.

  But instability lurked. A raggedy undercurrent roiled. The recession had gutted a lot of downtown businesses. There was not yet an open-container law on lower State Street; at night weaving drunks shouted at each other between breaks to piss and puke. The music clubs were changing. Folk and disco were out, replaced by angrier punk. The local papers were reporting that an anonymous male caller was telling children ages eleven to fifteen who answered the phone that they were going to die. Another caller, maybe the same man, was telling women that he’d hurt

  their husbands if they didn’t comply with his demands. Local cops nicknamed the unidentified creep “our breather.”

  There was a stoplight at State Street and Highway 101, one of the main north-south routes spanning California, and for more than a decade a colorful parade of hippies held up signs there asking for rides to places like San Diego or Eureka. It was such a Santa Barbara tradition that the Texaco gas station kept felt-tip markers for the hitchhikers to use on their cardboard signs.

  But lately it was hard not to notice that, despite their Summer of Love robes and tambourines, the hippies weren’t young anymore. Up close, you could see they’d weathered not just wind and sun but gradations of defeat that had turned the light off in their eyes. There were fewer signs marked with destination requests. Some just paced in circles all day.

  Santa Barbara’s magenta bougainvillea could distract you from its hairline cracks. Cheri hoped no harm would come to Debbi out there. Every mother’s brain cycles through the litany of terrible things that might befall her child. Rarely does the reverse occur. Why should it? Especially for teenagers, who between seeing their parents as God and then as human view them temporarily as an obstacle, a particularly cumbersome door that won’t quite budge.

  No, it was Debbi who was, in the parlance of Klein Bottle, “at risk.” The story rarely ends well for the beautiful teenage runaway. This time it did.

  Not being home saved Debbi Domingo’s life.

  CHERI KNEW THAT HER DIFFICULTIES WITH DEBBI WERE JUST A rough spot, a bump in the road, and they would patch things up eventually. They’d laugh about it when Debbi had a teenager of her own. But in the meantime, she needed solutions. She was an office manager everyone described as a “mother hen,” who, it seemed, could neither mother nor manage her own daughter.

  “How do you do it?” Cheri asked her best friend, Ellen,* as they sat in Ellen’s Jacuzzi in the backyard drinking wine. Ellen had three foster girls, all teenagers, living with her and her husband. Girls born drug-addicted. Abandoned on doorsteps. Cheri marveled at how well behaved they were.

  “Discipline,” Ellen said.

  The way Ellen saw it, Cheri’s attempt at disciplining Debbi had come too late. She’d been too permissive. Ellen demanded to know where her girls were at all times. The girls knew that if they cut class, either Ellen or her husband, Hank, would show up at school wearing a placard identifying themselves as the truant’s babysitter. The risk of social mortification kept them in line.

  Cheri, on the other hand, had given Debbi a long leash. She was patient when Debbi broke curfew or didn’t check in. Cheri was by nature an optimistic, level-headed person; she believed Debbi was engaging in typical teenage behavior and was reluctant to bring the hammer down. The phase would pass, she said. Cheri was just nineteen when Debbi was born, and in happier times, when mother and daughter tried on clothes together at the mall or had lunch at their favorite restaurant, Pancho Villa, they delighted when strangers took them for sisters. They’d giggle at the assumption. The strangers would realize their mistake. Of course these two weren’t sisters. They were friends.

  Which is why, in the months of escalating tension when Debbi would scream, “I don’t care about your rules! You’re ruining my life!” Cheri’s reply, while true, had a meek, uncertain tenor to it: “But I’m the mom.”

  The starting pistol that began the collision course was the divorce. Cheryl Grace Smith met Roger Dean Domingo, an electronics technician in the coast guard two years her senior, when she was in high school. They married shortly after Cheri turned

  eighteen, on September 19, 1964, in San Diego. Debbi was born the following August. Almost exactly a year later, a son, David, arrived. Roger left the coast guard and became a Methodist minister, then a middle-school teacher. In 1975 the family moved to Santa Barbara.

  Debbi remembers the first twelve years of her life in a warm amber light. Cheri doling out home-baked sugar cookies. Picnic lunches at Nojoqui Falls Park. She loved having young parents, the kind who didn’t watch you from the park bench but hoisted you onto the monkey bars and scrambled up the rocks after you at the beach.
Cheri and Roger were physically fit people raised in the sun, and their demeanor showed it. “I didn’t know what cynicism was until I hit junior high,” Debbi says.

  A strain developed between Cheri and Roger somewhere along the line. There exists a 1,157-page Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department report, much of it dedicated to the details of Cheri’s life; on page 130, Roger is questioned about their marriage, in particular their social life in Santa Barbara. He recalls outdoor picnics. They liked to visit Solvang, he says, a quaint Danish-themed village nearby. Midinterview he switches pronouns from “we” to “she.” Cheri liked to dance. She liked to “party.” It’s unclear if the quotations are Roger’s or the interviewer’s. But they hang there accusingly. Cheri wasn’t a drug abuser or hard drinker; the word “party” likely reveals more about inclination. Roger was content with a wicker basket and a blanket on the grass; at some point Cheri wanted more. They separated in December 1976.

  Roger moved back to San Diego, and Debbi and David split their time between the two cities. Debbi recognized an opportunity in the family splinter. She began playing her parents against each other. She tested limits. Ignored house rules. At the slightest hint of pushback she’d pack her bag and announce she was going to live with the other parent. She ping-ponged this way for several years, shuttling back and forth between San Diego and Santa

  Barbara, switching schools at least a half-dozen times, sometimes midyear. By July 1981, her once good grades had taken a dive. She was hung up on an older boyfriend in San Diego whom Cheri and Roger, who rarely were in accord on anything, agreed was bad news.

  A defiant teenager in full rebellious bloom can rattle the most stable of families, so it didn’t help matters that Cheri’s life was in flux and under stress too. In June, with the economy tanking, she and Ellen were laid off from their jobs at Trimm Industries, a small firm that manufactured computer furniture. Cheri spearheaded their search for new employment by renting an IBM Selectric typewriter and polishing their résumés. Then, on top of everything else, she decided to move.